Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction. For most of the duration, it’s an interesting, thinking-person’s vampire movie with a couple of truly horrific sequences. Then in the last few minutes
the guilt-ridden vampire protagonist tries to commit suicide by communion wafer and it apparently heals her of vampirism; the last few moments of the film show her walking in a cemetery in broad daylight
That ending seemed so contrived and stupid that it just sunk the whole rest of the movie for me.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is great fun, right up to when Eddie gets picked. The rest of the movie is sluggish and dull when compared to the first half.
2001
The first and last parts are pretentious faff but the middle section with HAL is a tight psychological thriller about a rogue AI which resonates even more strongly today.
People love to bag on The English Patient, but if you stick to the 1945 scenes and skip the flashbacks, it’s close to stunning. Any scene with Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews is good, specifically his entrance, when he walks in on her playing the tilted piano, and the scene where he hoists her up on a rope so she can see the murals. And you gotta love Willem Dafoe as a thief who has had his thumbs cut off and is still thieving. The two blondes can get lost, except for…the bit where they meet up again in Egypt or wherever. She walks in, silhouetted in a white dress, and he stares at her for a looooong moment and then tears it off her.
Funny…I was thinking the other day that Midnight Cowboy was dragged down by Jon Voight and apparently I’ve had that thought before.
I liked the first act of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” with the husband and wife adopting a robot child. The rest of the movie with carnivals and aliens and Jude Law was not the movie I was hoping for.
**The Fifth Element **with Bruce Willis. Great looking science fiction story, with lots of fun situations and effects. Most of it is pretty good… until the ending starts to unfold. Then the plot just sinks into a swamp of uck.
I had a similar feeling when I was recently watching Ghostbusters and Suicide Squad. I only like the first half or two thirds, the others parts were bland.
Totally agree with this. I love the framing story and the characters in it, and chapter-jump over most of the prewar stuff. Naveen Andrews is hot. Juliette Binoche is darling. And I always love Kevin Whately.
And I am another one of those people who watch 2001 by going directly to the Blue Danube docking sequence, watch the part with Frank, Dave, and Hal until I get to the psychedelic show, then skip over that to go straight to the alien hotel room.
This is Spinal Tap. The thing is, I like every part. Any given 10 minute stretch is a scream, I just can’t watch the whole thing in one sitting. It’s too painful watching the band constantly embarrass themselves.
I’ll always tune in Independence Day if it’s on, but I only like scenes with Will Smith or Brent Spiner. The rest is pretty silly.
I reckon a lot of people must have walked out early while watching Psycho. The Janet Leigh ‘prologue’ is extremely boring.
I know that’s the big swerve, going against movie convention, but it’s really dull.
I only like the first part of Into the Woods with the great set-up song. We recently saw a children’s theater production that lasted 60 minutes and consisted of just the first act, and I was just fine with that.
Heat
I think Terry Gilliam at his best is fantastic, but often find him too indulgent. Brazil is the best example of this for me. In general, I love the movie and the dystopia is awesome to watch. But man, those dream sequences were too much. The first couple of times, okay. But after a while it just felt like I was watching Terry Gilliam play with dolls. 12 Monkeys is a movie where I really felt he shined, and his surreal sensibilities was icing on a delicious cake. But some of his other work just feels like eating a cake made of solid icing. Blergh.
OTOH, I like the part of the movie only and the rest is just boring crap. Martin Balsam just didn’t bring anything to the table. OTOH, Tony Perkins and Janet Leigh’s interactions were quite tense.
I would expand this to include just about every Michael Mann film.
It’s hard to imagine that there could be a more vivid example of this than Artificial Intelligence, which has such a dramatic break at around the halfway point that it’s almost like two separate films, though it comes together again at the end. It’s almost like Spielberg was directing the first half and the ghost and preferences of Kubrick dominated most of the second.
I actually love the whole film, but parts of the second half are a bit annoying.
Me too. Their conversation together in the motel office full of taxidermied birds is the most interesting scene to me. I tend to watch the first part of the movie, up until the moment when Janet Leigh’s car sinks into the swamp; the investigation that follows doesn’t hold my attention.
Ooh, I got another one: Tootsie. I don’t like the main story, for various reasons, but I like the opening montage of auditions/rejections (“I can play taller! I can play shorter! I can be older, younger, anything you want me to be!”) intercut with the party and Bill Murray’s drunken playwright. And of course the scene with his agent is gold. “You were a tomato!! A tomato doesn’t have logic; a tomato can’t move!”